Black Inc

What can a reader expect from the ‘shortest’ history of anything? Probably something that gives basic information about that subject with a possible admixture of humour and a fresh approach that conceals the gaps that brevity inevitably produces. Mart Kuldkepp’s shortest history of Scandinavia achieves these goals skilfully and can be trusted to provide the general reader with a reliable narrative. It also succeeds in analysing what it is about the countries that we call Scandinavia that makes them special, creating a sense of ‘Nordicness’ that is recognised by both insiders and outsiders.

Of all the revolutionary regimes of the modern era, few sought to remake society as radically as Communist  China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to purge ‘class enemies’ and revitalise socialist ideals, the movement quickly spiralled into widespread upheaval that slipped beyond the Party’s control. Amid mass campaigns and brutal struggles, waves of political activism surged from below, jolting the very foundations of the Communist state and reshaping the country’s cultural and political landscape.

A few years ago, I spent a week in the village of Salamaua on the Huon Gulf coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). I delighted in swimming in the warm tropical waters that lap the village. After a dip or two, I wondered if there might be crocodiles about. My hosts told me that there was a resident crocodile; sometimes it came through the village at night, but I need not worry. In generations past, Salamauans and crocodiles had come to an agreement not to hurt each other, and since then the people of the village and their guests had been perfectly safe. I kept swimming.

When Moreno Giovannoni, in his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (2018), produced lines like ‘The Angel of Sadness draped its wings over the village and slept’, it was clear we were dealing with a writer of some poetic sensibility. Indeed, Giovannoni writes about his subjects with such care, tenderness, and gentle humour that it is possible to forget that the life he is depicting was more often than not ‘wretched’. He wrote his first book for two main reasons: to give readers the ‘flavour’ of a place and to depict the ‘travails of migrants’. These are also the reasons for his second book, The Immigrants, in many ways a companion to his first.

Toby Walsh’s The Shortest History of AI begins and ends with a sermon against panic. ‘Our children’, writes Walsh, ‘are set to inherit a worse world than the one we were born into, due to a raft of problems, some of which are caused by AI.’ The next couple of decades ‘will be challenging’. Yet Walsh is unequivocal in his faith: first, that artificial intelligence scientists will eventually achieve their final goal, ‘matching human intelligence in all its richness’, and second, that such a feat will be ultimately beneficial to humanity. The secret to such optimism, in the face of acknowledged ‘challenges’ ranging from racial and gendered bias to the ‘existential’, lies in learning ‘the lessons of the past’. And this book, writes Walsh, is not a bad place to start learning those lessons.

There is a popular image of the ‘Hexagon’ (the roughly six-sided shape of France) as a powerful, stable national entity with a confident, even overbearing, cultural identity. Colin Jones instead stresses France’s dynamic history as an ethnic and cultural melting pot and its shifting borders as a crucible of military conflict. The central thread of Jones’s engaging story is the tension between contested meanings of ‘Frenchness’ on the one hand, and France’s constant interactions with the wider world on the other.

Josephine Rowe’s third novel, Little World, is a little novel, at least in terms of its length, which resembles that of a novella. Little World is also about a little person, specifically a child, or rather, the preserved corpse of a child, said to be a saint. There is nothing small, though, about the novel’s impact, which is grandly and enduringly enigmatic.

There has been, for some time, a debate among researchers of Australian history. Should the moral and psychological dimensions of settler experience be examined, or do we know enough already?